Professional Documents
Culture Documents
deance
despair of willing despairingly to be oneself
! there is the determination to create his self, for he is aware of his innite self (spirit) ! thus he conceptualizes himself as xed, already nished; he wills rst to undertake to refashion the whole thing, in order to get out of it in this way a self such as he wants to have (202); does not yield to God ! makes himself god; this is the devils despair
At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many Is. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only onewhich you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I. [Dag Hammerskjld]
It is not depressing; on the contrary it is uplifting, since it views every man in the aspect of the highest demand made upon him, that he be spirit. Nor is it a paradox; on the contrary, it is a fundamental apprehension consistently carried through [...] (155)